Visual Indicator for which Semantic Model Your Report is Running Against?

[thx1137]

Good day,

We have 3 workspaces in the PBI Service, one each for Dev, Test, and Prod.

We are using "Live" Semantic models where we build all our reports off centralized models and have models in each of the workspaces for certain topic areas.

We intend to use Deployment Pipelines to move our content across environments in the future, but due to some constraints, not there yet.

Is there a way to expose to the Report (in a card, etc) what Semantic Model from which Workspaces a given report is built against/pulling data from?  The interface to change from one to another (Dev reports should be linked to the Dev Model in the Dev Workspace, etc.) is not super helpful regarding which specific model you are linked to, nor are consumers of our reports going to be able to use that.

Looking to understand if there is anything I can expose in the report that tells me or the user which model in which workspace the report they are consuming is linked to to avoid mistakes.  Other tools have report-level variables to expose this or leverage it for conditionally formatting the background, etc...some indication of what environment you are working against. 

Any thoughts on approaches to doing this in Power BI?

[thx1137 · Accepted solution]

Clever solution! 

[Bipin-Lala]

Hi @thx1137,

We also have a similar reporting structure, where we have DEV, TEST, and PROD Power BI Datasets deployed in 3 different workspaces. Each report uses a live connection to connect to datasets/ semantic models in each workspace.

In our case, we have created a parameter in the dataset itself called as Environment. It's value is set to Development, Test or Production, depending upon which workspace we are going to publish the workspace in.

This Environment parameter value is then displayed as a card on top of the page in our reports, indicating which dataset the report is currently connected to.

Don't forget to Enable Load for the parameter created, otherwise it won't be available in the Reporting Tab.

Similarly, we have also created a parameter for the workspace name and used it to display on top of the report page.

Although it's not an automated solution where we are automatically fetching workspace names as per the location of the semantic model, it still works well for us.

If you have to get the Workspace Name (and other related details) in the report automatically, you would have to make use of Power BI APIs and cmdlets to get that data, which would be an overkill.

• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/power-bi/overview?view=powerbi-ps
• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/power-bi/

Let me know if the suggestion helps!